This is the type of trade a team makes either if it is one piece away from winning a championship, or its management doesn’t place a premium on keeping its draft picks.

This is the type of trade the Rangers made on Wednesday, when they dealt the past and the future for the present in sending one first-rounder, one second-rounder that could become a first, and the remainder of Ryan Callahan’s season to Tampa Bay in exchange for 38-year-old Martin St. Louis — a dynamic, game-changing goal-scorer who, by the way, did we mention, is 38 years old?

General manager Glen Sather is all-in again on this season, maybe this year and next, with a flawed team that doesn’t appear big enough, tough enough or deep enough to take out the Bruins, even if the Rangers are likely a tougher out in the playoffs — if they get there — than they were before pulling off this trade.

When a team hasn’t won in going on 20 years, going for it all isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, but part of the reason a team doesn’t win in 20 years is a penchant for rushing the process and treating the draft and development dynamic as secondary to the free-agent and trade market.

The Rangers didn’t have a first-round draft choice in 2013 — that pick sent to Columbus in the deal for Rick Nash. They won’t have one in 2015 — that gone with Callahan to Tampa Bay. If they reach the conference finals this year, they won’t have a No. 1 this June, either — the 2014 second-rounder becoming a No. 1.

Suddenly, the Ranger roster has nine players developed within the organization and 14 who arrived in trades or through free agency.

No one invites a team to the Canyon of Heroes for being one of the last four teams standing, or did we miss the parade two years ago when the Devils took out the Rangers in the conference finals? Yet by winning two rounds, the Blueshirts forfeit another first, which is nothing to be sneezed at in a hard-cap league that demands value from players on entry-level contracts.

Sather did go as far as he could in the negotiations with Callahan, a proud Blueblood who was a credit to the uniform but whose hard-bargaining asking price from start to finish never quite coincided with his stated desire to remain a Ranger.

Given the impasse, Sather essentially had three choices. The first was to keep Callahan as their own rental player, then allow him to walk on July 1 without a return beyond what he would have provided on the ice the rest of the season. This, the GM decided long ago, was out of the question.

The second was to move Callahan for a package of draft picks or prospects on a deadline day, where the rental market seemed as depressed as an army of Islanders season ticket holders.

The third was to actually deal draft picks with Callahan for St. Louis.

Sather acknowledged he could have pulled the trigger on a deal for futures — San Jose made the offer we’re told was eminently passable — but preferred the St. Louis option. That’s why they call him Go For It Glen. Well, no one ever has called him that until now.

St. Louis comes with an exceptional heart and skill package, an ability to put the puck in the net, and a burning desire to prove everyone wrong.

“I know this is going to be a challenge for me, but I love challenges,” he said following Wednesday’s 3-2 overtime defeat to the Maple Leafs at the Garden — in which he recorded three shots in 20:11 of ice time while on a line with his old Lightning running buddy, Brad Richards. “I know what comes with it.”

But St. Louis comes with a birth certificate, too — Donald Trump could even check it — and the Rangers come with an organizational history that includes getting Hall of Fame players on the wrong side of the career parabola.

But of course St. Louis — who did lead the NHL in scoring last year and arrived in New York with 61 points (29 goals, 32 assists) in 62 games, 17 points more than Ranger-leader Richards — won’t be Bernie Geoffrion, and of course he won’t be Marcel Dionne, and obviously he won’t be Jari Kurri, either.

Still, not being those guys won’t be enough to justify this trade. It can’t be when so much of the future went the other way. There’s one way and one way only, and that’s for St. Louis and the Rangers to win the Stanley Cup.